This copy is for your personal non-commercial use only. To order presentation-ready copies of Toronto Star content for distribution to colleagues, clients or customers, or inquire about permissions/licensing, please go to: www.TorontoStarReprints.com

U.S. soldier pleads guilty to murdering 16 Afghan civilians

Robert Bales pleaded guilty to murder and acknowledged that there was “not a good reason in this world” for his actions.

U.S. Army Staff Sgt. Robert Bales, left, pleaded guilty Wednesday to multiple counts of murder stemming from an attack on two villages in Afghanistan in March 2012. (Peter Millett / AP)

By Gene JohnsonThe Associated Press

Wed., June 5, 2013

JOINT BASE LEWIS-MCCHORD, WASH.—The U.S. soldier accused of killing 16 Afghan civilians, many of them women and children who were asleep in their villages, pleaded guilty to murder and acknowledged that there was “not a good reason in this world” for his actions.

Robert Bales’ plea Wednesday ensures that he will avoid the death penalty for the nighttime slayings that so inflamed tensions with Afghans that the U.S. military briefly suspended combat operations there.

Prosecutors say Bales slipped away before dawn on March 11, 2012, from his base in Kandahar Province. Armed with a 9 mm pistol and an M-4 rifle equipped with a grenade launcher, he attacked a village of mud-walled compounds called Alkozai, then returned and woke up a fellow soldier to tell him about it.

The soldier didn’t believe Bales and went back to sleep. Bales then left to attack a second village known as Najiban.

A jury will decide in August whether Bales is sentenced to life with or without the possibility of parole.

Article Continued Below

Wednesday’s proceedings marked the first time Bales, 39, provided a public account of the massacre. At one point, the judge, Col. Jeffery Nance, asked him why he killed the villagers.

“I’ve asked that question a million times since then,” Bales replied. “There’s not a good reason in this world for why I did the horrible things I did.”

Bales said he decided to kill everyone after struggling with one of the women.

Asked by Nance whether he had poured kerosene on some of his victims and set them on fire as the charges against him specified, Bales said he remembered seeing a kerosene lamp in one of the village compounds, and later found matches in his pocket. But bodies on fire? He did not remember that, he said.

Then he conceded that the cumulative evidence was clear that it must have happened, and that he must, in fact, have done it.

“It’s the only thing that makes sense, sir,” Bales said.

Asked by the judge about his illegal use of steroids, another charge Bales admitted to on Wednesday, the defendant said he had wanted to get stronger, but the drugs “definitely increased my irritability and anger.”

Whether those mood shifts played into the crime was unaddressed.

Survivors who testified by video link from Afghanistan during a hearing last year vividly recalled the carnage. A young girl described hiding behind her father as he was shot to death. Boys told of hiding behind curtains as others begged the soldier to spare them, yelling, “We are children!” A man told of being shot in the neck by a gunman “as close as this bottle,” gesturing to a water bottle on a table in front of him.

The deaths raised questions about the frequency of combat deployments and post-traumatic stress disorder. Bales was serving his fourth deployment. Until the attacks, he had a good, if undistinguished, military record in a decade-long career. He suffered from PTSD and a traumatic brain injury, his lawyers say, and in he had been drinking contraband alcohol and snorting Valium — both provided by other soldiers — the night of the killings.

Given Bales’ prior deployments and apparent PTSD, military law experts have suggested that a jury is unlikely to sentence him to death. Defence attorney John Henry Browne had sought to place blame with the military for sending Bales back to war.

More from the Toronto Star & Partners

LOADING

Copyright owned or licensed by Toronto Star Newspapers Limited. All rights reserved. Republication or distribution of this content is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Toronto Star Newspapers Limited and/or its licensors. To order copies of Toronto Star articles, please go to: www.TorontoStarReprints.com